Sunglasses
by TheSparkler
Summary: When she fails a school vision test, perfect Chloe must face the un-faceable... but can the clever doctor save her sense of fashion - and her fate?


**Hey guys! Long time no see! At long last, here is a new story just for you, featuring (for the first time by my hand) everyone's favorite blonde. Happy reading!**

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"Daddy! This can't possibly be right! How could I fail a _vison_ test? My eyes work just fine!"

The Mayor struggled to remain smiling, once again showing his daughter the letter from the school nurse. "It simply says that you are in need of slight vision correction in order to see the board during class, darling. I'm sure that everyone will just _love_ your new glasses when you get them."

"GLASSES?"

He sighed. It was going to be a long day.

* * *

Two days later (much to her dismay), Chloe found herself sitting in a green-and-black chair waiting for the eye doctor. The eye care center was mostly one big room, with smaller exam rooms branching off of it. The waiting area she was in was full of desks with computers, one of which currently contained the doctor's 20-something black-haired assistant, who was talking to an elderly woman about renewing her prescription. The woman soon finished her appointment and continued on her way, leaving Chloe alone in the room. Her father had left her there to run an errand with the promise that he would be back soon, and the doctor himself was preparing one of the exam rooms for a more advanced vision test than the one that the school nurse had given her. Chloe looked straight ahead, trying to pretend that she couldn't see the hundreds of glasses frames that hung on the walls around her. She would be forced to wear them soon enough – she wasn't about to look them any sooner than she had to.

"Chloe Bourgeois?" She turned to find the assistant from earlier, Alex, standing behind her. He gestured her to follow him, leading her to one of the side rooms.

"We're just going to go through your regular eye tests, okay?"

She nodded and sat down in the rolling chair, resisting the urge to push off with her feet and send it flying across the room's slick tile. He did a glaucoma test, which was basically just a shot of air at her eye (that was always her least favorite part), and had her watch a picture move from clear to blurry and back again to test her focus. After that, she went back to the waiting room, where she found her father sitting in the chair that she had recently vacated, looking at a political magazine. The doctor called her back and seemed surprised to see her. Her father had explained the letter to him several minutes before, while waiting for his daughter to come back from the first tests.

"Chloe! I hear you're needing some glasses, is that right? You're vision tests have always been so good!"

Chloe wrinkled her nose and huffed in response, dropping into the oversized black chair at the far end of the room. "Trust me, Doc, this was _not_ my idea."

Doctor Brown smiled and shook his head, used to the teen's strict attitude. She had always taken pride in her perfect vision, and he knew that needing glasses seemed like a huge blow to the young blonde's self-esteem. Knowing her, Chloe would recover in no time.

"Alright, we are just going to start with your run-of-the-mill, reading-the-lines type stuff. Okay?"

She nodded, sitting up straight as he dimmed the lights and clicked on the screen at the other side of the rectangular room.

" H"

"B C N W"

"V X Z…O?"

Now she was starting to squint, straining to see the letters as they got smaller and smaller with each line.

"Close, but that's actually a 'C'. Don't worry, that's where a lot of people tend to get stuck and things get blurry," assured Brown, seeing her frustration slowly start to rise. He reached backward to the desk behind him and handed her what looked like a really flat ladle.

"Now I'm going to have you cover your left eye and try again," he explained, clicked to a new slide as she held up the piece of black plastic to her face.

" A"

" A…M?"

"Almost! That last one there was an 'N'. Now cover your right eye and do the same thing." The light flashed as he moved to the next slide.

"U E N H"

"P C J T"

" P"

Taking back the eye cover, the doctor looked thoughtful. "That last letter was an 'R' rather than a 'P', but the vision in your right eye seems to be slightly better than your left."

He swung a seemingly-huge panel in front of Chloe's face and had her prop her chin on a small ledge attached to the bottom.

"This deceive is called a _phoropter_ , and it holds many different types of lenses. We are going to use it try you out with a few of them, okay?"

Chloe, feeling completely ridiculous, nodded as best she could with the plastic under her face. The doctor flipped several small levers on the sides, which just made her vision worse. When she couldn't read even the top line, he clicked a few more, and suddenly the screen in front of her became crystal clear. She rattled off every letter on the screen – even the teeny tiny ones at the bottom that she sometimes missed during past visits. Brown smiled as he changed the screen and she once again read off all five lines. He quickly jotted down which lenses had worked, then moved the retractable arm to pull the phoropter back into the corner of the room.

"It looks like you really will need glasses to see during class," he explained, showing Chloe the eye chart that he was writing on. "They won't be very strong to start, and you won't have to wear them all the time, just when you need them to see smaller things far away, okay?"

Chloe, disappointed at her own eyesight, nodded slowly.

"If you would like," Brown continued, seeing the look on her face, "we can have you try working with contacts, which would have the same effect as the glasses without you have to wear the external frames."

"Really? Let's go!" Chloe positively bounced out of the room. Alex, knowing what Brown would say, led her to a small room behind the front counter that had a sink, several mirrors, and a wall full of cabinets.

"The first thing to know about contacts is that you need to keep them clean when you're putting them in. These are daily lenses, so you can just throw 'em away at the end of each day. If they work, we'll get you lenses that will last up to a month at a time, and I'll teach you how to clean and care for them later. For now," he motioned to one of the sinks, "you should wash your hands, and be sure to get all of the soap off so that none of it gets onto the contact." While she dried her hands, he reached into the cabinet above them and pulled open a drawer from the large organizer inside. He scooped several foil-covered pieces of plastic into his hand and laid them out on the counter. Before she tried to put them in herself, Chloe had to watch a short video on how they worked and which way they went in. She was surprised to learn that contacts could be inside out – they were so thin, it's not like you could open them, right?

"The term 'inside out' just means that they're facing the wrong way," Alex explained, opening one of the contact containers and fishing the clear lens out of the sterile saline solution to show her. As a wearer of contacts himself, he completely understood her confusion.

"Do you see these numbers on the side? If you can read this '123' when looking at them from the outside, then they're the right way. If you can't, then you need to flip the contact the other way so that you can read it."

He had her open one of the containers and try it for herself, checking which way it was facing before using the mirrors by the sink and moving her hand toward her face.

"Ow!"

Chloe rubbed at her eye, then realized that the contact was no longer on her finger. Was it lost in her eye? After a moment of frantic searching, she found it on the counter in front of her.

"It's alright," Alex assured, getting her a new lens. "You just used a little more pressure than you needed. It takes hardly any push at all – once the contact touches your eye, it should gently stick. Then all you have to do is carefully pull your finger away, and that way you don't poke yourself in the eye as easily. You can go ahead and try again, if you want."

Chloe, determined to make the contacts work, moved slower this time. To her dismay, it didn't work the second time, either – or the 3rd, or the 5th, or the 9th. Finally, she gave up.

"I guess I'll just have to be a glasses-wearing freak for the rest of my life then!" she shrieked, throwing up her hands and seeing her irritated eyes in the mirror. Alex did his best to console her, but he knew that there wasn't much he could do to help (it's not like he was a superhero!).

Chloe trudged back into the main room, finally looking at all of the frames on the walls. Red frames, blue frames, frames with every color of the rainbow; metal frames, plastic frames, frames the size of her whole face – and she hated all of them. Mayor Bourgeois moved to sit at one of the tables to talk to Doctor Brown about how much the glasses would be.

"If you would like," said the doctor, showing him a green and blue pamphlet, "you can get transition lenses, so that the lenses will turn dark and act like sunglasses when she goes outside."

"Chloe? How does that sound to you?" She slowly moved toward them to look at the pamphlet, walking as though she was sinking in mud. Bored, she flipped through it in record time, tuned out of the conversation, and scanned the other pamphlets on the desk.

"Clip-on sunglasses, magnetic sunglasses…wait, what is this?" She pulled out a bright yellow page and turned toward the doctor.

He recognized the paper and grinned, opening a new tab on the computer. "That, my dear, might just be your answer!"

A week later, they came in the mail, packed carefully so that they wouldn't scratch or break during shipping. Chloe, pulling them carefully out of the protective paper, found that she liked the solid white around the edge. They were a little big, but not enough to be weird and just enough to be dramatic. She tucked them into her hair as she left, not wanting to use them until she actually needed them and knowing that they would draw more attention if she had to take them out of a case in front of everyone. As the limo pulled up outside the school, Sabrina came out to meet her and complimented them, stammering on for several minutes. She sat down as the bell rang, feeling the looks from the rest of the class, and finding that she liked the attention. As Ms. Bustier started, most of the class turned to face their teacher, pulling out notebooks and pens as she talked. She wrote several problems on the board for them to do as a review from the day before, and Chloe was slightly disappointed that she couldn't read them clearly. Glad that she would no longer have to worry about copying things wrong, she pulled the glasses down from her head, making the world much clearer – darker, but clearer. She grinned and started her work, knowing that some of her classmates were staring, but it didn't bother her in the slightest. After all, she couldn't blame them. Without knowing the true power of the white-framed glasses on her face, they would certainly make people wonder as to why the snobby, blonde, rich girl was wearing sunglass indoors.

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 **This is a one-shot and is therefore complete. Let me know what you think - comments make my day!**


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